Infochimps – Big Data In The Rackspace Cloud

This is a guest blog post written and contributed by Joe Kelly, CEO of Infochimps, a big data provider and Rackspace customer. Infochimps is an early customer of the next generation Rackspace Cloud.

Infochimps, the first open data marketplace and a leading provider of tools, content and operational expertise for big data infrastructure, now supports the next generation Rackspace Cloud, based on OpenStack. Through integration with the OpenStack API the Infochimps Platform can now power big data applications based in the Rackspace Cloud, expanding the reach of the Infochimps Platform and making the running of complex big data infrastructures quick and easy for a broader range of users.

Rackspace customers running the new OpenStack-based Rackspace Cloud Servers, which is now available via a “Limited Availability” program, can quickly and easily spin up Hadoop clusters to power their big data applications in as little as 20 minutes with a single command using the Infochimps Platform. With the power of Ironfan, Infochimps’ open source provisioning tool, and Dashpot, Infochimps’ visualization and operations dashboard, customers can easily monitor and manage their Big Data operations on an ongoing basis, or leave it to Infochimps to manage it on the Rackspace Cloud for them.

Check out this demo of Infochimps Platform running in the Rackspace Cloud:

An Open Platform For Big Data Applications

From the beginning, the Infochimps Platform has been built on a foundation of open source tools for managing data, aimed at simplifying the experience of working with complex technologies such as Hadoop or Cassandra. Within the Infochimps Platform, Wukong, Ironfan and Swineherd are major open sourced components of the stack. OpenStack supports our open source tradition with its strong open source ecosystem. It is used by and contributed to by not only Rackspace, but also organizations such as NASA, Canonical, Red Hat, Dell, HP and AT&T. So, its architecture serves a multitude of needs, rather than bending to the whims of a single provider.

With the Infochimps Platform, enterprises can run their big data operations for a fraction of the cost of doing it in-house, while speeding the initial implementation by months. The Platform offers a complete, end-to-end big data solution, including secure data delivery at scale, coordination of large distributed systems, access to elastic Hadoop resources and dependable storage that enterprise organizations can trust.